Abstract
The Central Plateau of Burkina Faso in semi-arid West
Africa is well-known for a variety of soil and water conservation
and environmental management programs initiated by the state, NGOs and
international donors since the late 1970s. Development organizations have a
strong presence in this region of high out-migration, rapid population growth
and visible land degradation, and their presence has been encouraged by the
government. A study of the impacts of 'village land use management' was carried
out in cooperation with an environmental program in BamProvince
from 1992-1993, in order to assess the environmental, social and economic
impacts of these environmental conservation activities. A cultural ecological
analysis was made of the livelihood systems of two remote Mossi
and Yarse villages in Rollodepartement, and the technical and social
interventions carried out in these same communities were also monitored. The
local Sudano-Sahelian ecology consists of diverse
landscapes showing considerable modification, and is dominated by rain-fed
agricultural production in nucleated Mossi
settlements. Human adaptation to changeable resource endowments, technology,
labor and ecology give rise to high variability in livelihood decisions,
resulting in complex spatial patterns. Crop yields are variable, and are
frequently insufficient to meet household and community needs. Intensification
of agriculture is selective, and specific to certain individuals and sites.
Off-farm incomes, animal sales and remittances from migrants are significant
for many households.

Village land use management (gestion des terroirsvillageois), engages
sedentary 'communities' to overcome conflicts and to participate
enthusiastically in communal environmental management of their 'village
territories'. This approach has many positive benefits for social solidarities
and for land rehabilitation, but it can overlook the complexities of land use,
agricultural knowledge and the plural rationalities of Mossi
and Yarse farmers. As this approach to land
degradation spreads to other Sahelian countries and
is widely adopted by development aid agencies for its 'participatory' elements,
it first requires rigorous evaluation at the local level. The approach has
nonetheless generated high levels of participation, new institutions, and
buffered many individuals against food stress and hardship. By combining an
analysis of agrarian and social systems with work on development interventions,
the study contributes to a political ecology of environmental management. Using
hybrid research methods, it bridges an all-too-common divide between
theoretical understanding of nested scales of human-environment interventions,
and the practical efforts of arid lands managers.

Introduction
The wider context for the study
The local context for this study
Organization of the study, and methods used
Analytical Frameworks
Cultural Ecology and the adaptational frame
Political ecology
Action-centered rural development
Sustainability
Conclusion - the approach adopted

Chapter 2. MOSSI WORLDS: POLITICS, ECONOMY,
COSMOLOGY & ENVIRONMENT

The Mossi:
a people
Political and social development of Burkina Faso
Economy and Trade
Agricultural production
Social Organization
Environmental Characteristics
Conclusion

Chapter 3. LAND DEGRADATION AND LAND REHABILITATION
IN BURKINA FASO

Introduction
The effects of land degradation on farming systems
Land rehabilitation techniques on the Central Plateau
Soil and Water Conservation - the project environment Gestion des terroirs -
a second-best form of community development?
Local Projects
Conclusion

Chapter 4. LAND USE, ENVIRONMENT AND SOCIETY IN IBI
AND TOESSIN, BAMPROVINCE

Background
Trends in land use
Soil and water resources
Development and history of village organizations
Forestry and fuelwood
Animal ownership and agro-pastoralism
Wild foods and food stress
Conclusion

Chapter 5. THE FARMING SYSTEM

Introduction
The Mossi Farming System
Diet
Field positions and social changes
The ring management system
Pest Management
Labor use and the farming cycle
The Farmer Survey
Farm sizes and soil type
Inputs
Productivity measures and labor inputs
Discussion: agrarian change and agricultural intensification
Conclusion

Chapter 6. AGRICULTURAL HARVESTS,
AND THE POTENTIAL IMPACT OF SOIL CONSERVATION ON YIELDS

Introduction
Harvest data
Soil and water conservation and agriculture in the study villages
The benefits of SWC for crop yields
Discussion and conclusion

Introduction - productive bricolage
Methodology
The major off-farm income sources
Perceptions of expenditure and revenue sources
The special role of migration
Expenditure and income balances
Conclusion

Chapter 8. MANAGING THE ENVIRONMENT: THE PROBLEMS
OF INTERFACES AND COMMUNICATION IN GESTION DES TERROIRS PROJECTS

Development messages and
community needs
A social actor perspective
Supporting local institutions
Communication problems in Gestion des Terroirs
The village level
Confusions at the village scale
Confusions in the project
A case study of the Training and Visit (T&V) extension system
Conclusion

Chapter 9. IMPLICATIONS AND CONCLUSIONS

Land degradation and
"planned" resource management
Agrarian change
Village Organizations and Grass-RootsactionVillageLand
Use Management and "community" resource management
The implications for geographical practice
Conclusion

GLOSSARY
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Chapter 9. IMPLICATIONS AND CONCLUSIONSThis dissertation has touched on the history and
cultural ecology of the Mossi people, their
transformation of the Central Plateau of Burkina Faso, and the failures and
successes of environmental management initiatives in this region. The scale of
analysis has shifted from the actions of individual farmers to the policies of
aid donors and state agencies. The work is bound together by the need to
understand changing human-environment relations, and the particular impacts of
development organizations working in the domain of gestion
des terroirsvillageois
(village land use management) and soil and water conservation. This Chapter
summarizes the main findings, and brings the study back to its entry-point: the
implications for sound environmental management, and geographical understanding
of human-environment relations. Firstly, I discuss how local views and
reactions to land degradation must be viewed as adaptive responses that
incorporate external techniques and assistance where these accord with local
social solidarities (solidarities that favor some communal activity at the
community level) and individual needs. Secondly, I extend this argument to
account for patterns of agrarian change. The case studies reveal that farmers
are selectively intensifying and extensifying their
agricultural systems under conditions of labor shortage and poor crop yields.
Soil and water conservation is merely one component of adaptation to adverse
conditions. Because the gestion des terroirs model of land rehabilitation is initiated by
outside actors and there are still significant problems in its delivery to
poorer or marginalized sectors of rural society, I term it a "second
best" form of community development, albeit an exciting one, that can
easily overlook inter-community differences and power structures unless it is
very closely monitored or led almost entirely by inclusive village
organizations. In section 9.4 I suggest that assistance to the farmers of the
Central Plateau with environmental rehabilitation and the development of new
agro-ecosystems is an important arena for the involvement of geographers, who
are poorly represented in the region and in practical development work. I
justify this presumptuous critique by pointing to the spatial skills required
in the gestion des terroirs
approach, and the frequent failure of political ecologists to actually work
with the same development organizations that they are all to ready to criticize
as power-laden and sometimes ineffective actors in rural development.

9.1 Land degradation and "planned" resource managementLand degradation continues to pose a threat to livelihood
systems and the well-being of rural people on the Mossi
Plateau. Its ecological, social and political complexities are now reasonably
well understood in broad terms. The challenge to the development of sustainable
agro-ecologies is less to design high-yielding farming systems (which, while
beginning with simple erosion control, may involve agrochemical or other
relatively costly inputs still scarce and expensive in this region), but rather
to create sound management practices which local people can adapt and change to
suit their own personal aspirations and those of their communities. This
resource management agenda can adapt to a variety of demographic and political
situations, and reflects current thinking in "farmer participatory
research" (Reijntjes et al, 1992). It has
laudable aims, but it has also been accused of being uncritically supportive of
local community "groups", without defining the power structures and
inequalities of those groups. In Burkina Faso it has been linked to
a considerable confusion of donor interventions, projects, programs and
government schemes in rural areas. The particular brand of development thinking
represented by the German environmental project described in this study
(PATECORE) accounts for local participation in environmental planning by means
of research with groups of farmers, meetings, encouragements to institutions at
the village level, and support to local government agencies. It also provides
and supports the use of limited "external" technologies such as
trucks and carts, to aid land rehabilitation activities largely carried out by
farmers themselves. The state plays a role in this process as a bilateral
partner at project level, and through providing agricultural extension agents
who monitor and assist local level interventions.

This approach has done much to support environmental rehabilitation at the
local level, and many of its training activities and interventions have allowed
resource-poor farmers to participate in new activities. In many ways, the
project has expanded the "range of choice" in everyday life (to adopt
Gilbert White's famous phrase) and has assisted indigenous experimentation
within locally adapted livelihood systems. The Central Plateau is now distinguished
by its innovative approaches to the conservation of natural resources, notably
soil and water, and is a true laboratory for such techniques.

The history of these interventions, as viewed through the eyes of farmers in
two study villages, reveals much of interest about the process of environmental
management, and shows how it has succeeded in some areas but failed in others.
GTV methods build upon a sense of non-economic motivation and communal sharing
in Mossi society (Fiske,
1990b). It is important, therefore, to identify how important these communal
sharing motivations are in everyday decisions and actions. As Raynaut (1997:321) reminds us, Sahelian
societies do not consist only of individualistic, rational economic actors.
Nonetheless, Mossi farmers prefer (or are forced) to
maximize their own market or economic opportunities at certain times, and I
have shown in Chapter Seven that marketing and income generation are important
to most households. Societies like the Mossi have
shared values, traditions and world-views but this does not mean that they are
composed of people with similar social relations and economic means.
Environmental management is an activity where communal sharing motivations are
vital, because of the large co-ordinated labor inputs
required for diguette construction, tree-planting and
so-on, and because of the need for inclusive village organizations to oversee
and take decisions. But, simultaneously, there must be benefits to individuals
if the efforts invested in communal activities are to be sustained, and room
for their own experimentation so that new local technologies can be developed (Eyben & Ladbury, 1995). Even
as early as 1993, farmers in Ibi and Toessin were not receiving benefits from their
participation in group work. Data on the numbers of people involved in Toessin group activities (Figure 4.22) showed that the
numbers participating in diguette construction, for
example, were beginning to tail off towards the end of the study period. Women
in particular were excluded from the direct benefits of soil and water
conservation. Even if they manage to improve yields on their own land, it is
doubtful they will be rewarded with security of tenure or more support or
contributions from men. Therefore their interest in helping with SWC on communal
household fields will wane. Following the logic of the macro-sociologists like
Michael Thompson et al (1990) and Alan Fiske (1990b),
"social solidarities" or "communal sharing" require
constant re-reinforcement and negotiation - and a recognition of those left out
of this process - if they are to overcome the countervailing tendencies of
individual actors to seek different paths towards meeting their subsistence
needs - through migration, trading or opting out of village institutions
entirely.

In trying to understand why certain efforts at land rehabilitation or
certain agricultural techniques presented in the dissertation are carried out,
it is inadequate to assume that farmers are simply "adapting" to
difficult circumstances by choosing a particular set of actions, as populist
writers, and some forms of ecological reasoning, have led us to believe. They
are applying different technical practices, and developing knowledge that draws
only in part from development projects and extension agents. Supporters of
farmer's knowledge now emphasize peasant logic and forward thinking, the
marshalling of resources, and the overcoming of - not just the working with -
natural ecological constraints and environmental problems (see Batterbury,
1996a, Netting, 1993:28). Indigenous agricultural knowledge, long sidelined by
development programs, has consistently influenced (and evolved with) these
programs to reflect the new demands placed upon dryland
farmers. Farmers have incorporated useable techniques such as diguettes that have been developed in parallel
environments, and have largely rejected inappropriate packages including
chemical fertilizers (which are expensive, and poorly adapted to Sahelian soil fertility problems), "improved"
cereal varieties (appropriate, perhaps, to better soils and valley-bottoms
only), and expensive ox-drawn plows. This process of selection and adaptation
is very much part of the transformation of Sahelian
production systems and societies to meet changing opportunities and changing
constraints, as suggested in Chapter 1 (Raynaut,
1997).

The "planning" involved in technical assistance to these farmers,
of the sort described in this dissertation, cannot be equated with the dubious
"social engineering" agendas that Richards (1993:71-2) has identified
in much externally-imposed development work and agricultural research in West
Africa, even if we must acknowledge that some of its activities can be
misguided or partial. Farmers¼ skills and curiosity can guide these external
efforts, as can an understanding of the livelihood system itself (Batterbury,
1994a). It is important to work with the best of these organizations, which are
increasingly adopting hybrid organizational frameworks drawn from traditional
resource management practices, the knowledge of migrants, traders, and
extension services, and modern conceptions of development and community
self-help (see Edmunds, 1997).

9.2 Agrarian systems and their change
Farming remains firmly established as the economic base, and satisfies the
majority of community food needs even in years of poor rainfall. Part of the
goal of SWC must be to aid food production. While the logic of traditional
farming methods is well adjusted to ecological conditions and labor supply, the
ability of these methods to provide for all household needs is increasingly
called into question, and particularly in higher population areas of increased
land pressures where crop yields have declined considerably over the years and
large production units have "atomized" down to the household or
individual level. Where production units are small, labor shortages and the
effects of migration are keenly felt. In the early 1990s, neither study village
managed to meet its subsistence needs from subsistence farming. Although the
necessity of further micro-scale analysis on this issue is clear, it is simply
impossible to say from this study what the future holds for the Central Plateau
in terms of agricultural intensification trajectories. In Chapter Five,
intensification was defined as an increase in the effort expended per unit
area, to increase total output per unit area and over time. Soil and water
conservation is a form of land use intensification because it involves
investment of human and material resources in the land, and it is improving crop
yields (Adams & Mortimore, 1997). It was shown to
have wider benefits on moisture retention, soil quality and depth, and the
resistance of the soil to further erosion, despite the difficulties encountered
in measuring these variables in the field. It has arrived on the scene because
it has been promoted by external actors, thus changing local technical know-how
and farming practice. Almost every village in BamProvince
has a patchwork of fields criss-crossed by stone
lines and many now have several kilometers of diguettes
as well as tree plantations and protected bush areas. The majority of these
activities are in central, visible parts of the village territory. Despite
these positive effects, individual farmers, and notably the poor or
disadvantaged (those with insecure land tenure, some women, and those farming
far from the center) may still not receive on-farm benefits from SWC carried
out by village groups in central locations. The study therefore shows that
farmers maintain their own risk adverse farming strategies, and adopt SWC
selectively.

The study highlights the process of selective intensification on the Central
Plateau. In some cases farmers are selectively intensifying all or part of
their land, adopting inexpensive agronomic improvements such as manure
additions where appropriate, on their existing farmland. Selective
intensification also involves the recuperation of degraded land, by means of
progressive enlargements to field boundaries with stone cordons, zai, diguettes, and paillage. Elsewhere in the farming system, some farmers are
holding constant their labor inputs but extending the cultivated area using
plows. There are cases where soil and water conservation takes place on the
same fields as agronomic improvements and plowing, and examples of
diversification away from farming where migration and off-farm income
generation proves more lucrative or more satisfying. These techniques are
applied on sandy and gravelly mid-slope soils, valley bottoms, and at varying
distances from settlements depending on the knowledge, means, and land access
of the individual cultivator. These decisions are not random, but reflect the
contingent circumstances and outlook of individuals. These circumstances may
best by understood by empirical analysis of farmer
praxis, and with reference to actor rationales, constraints, and models of
behavior. They sum to certain "pathways of intensification", that are
visible at the terroir scale as distinct changes in
land use patterns over time.

The process of selective intensification indicates that the Central Plateau
is very far from the "virtuous circle" that links population increase
to a widespread intensification of technical practices in agriculture, as
identified for zones of higher population (Raynaut,
1997:320; Tiffen et al, 1994; Turner et al, 1993).
Indeed Marchal's work in Yatenga (1983a) contests the
privileged position of population growth as a driving force toward sustainable
high-yield agriculture, arguing against Boserupian
logics in this region of median population densities. Although based on very
limited and localized information, the data from the study villages tend to
confirm Marchal's findings, although I am less
pessimistic than Marchal about the future prospects
of the region's environment and people. There has not been a historical
conjunction of forces on the Plateau that has led to rapid agricultural
intensification; this intensification has been opportunistic and selective,
varying with land rights, the historical and social situation, and by locality.
Under conditions of labor and land shortage, some farmers choose to take on
more farm land to increase their gross yields; others may choose to intensify
existing farms by investing in soil and water conservation as well as other
improvements. Should a development project provide free assistance for natural
resource improvements, it is profitable for farmers to accept this assistance
and begin to intensify their farming strategies around the new erosion control
structures, thus forming a new "pathway" to intensification. Without
this assistance, other avenues - especially off-farm income
diversification, and the accumulation of animal herds - will be favored.

9.3 Village Organizations and Grass-Roots actionMoving to the organizational level, the case study
highlighted the dynamism of village institutions in the study villages and
elsewhere on the Central Plateau. I noted that a variety of institutional forms
can exist at this level, and I found that the re-invented naam
work-groups and solidarity networks, discussed in the first Chapter, were much
less well developed in the study region than in YatengaProvince.
Not all local institutions will be appropriate contact-points for external
support organizations like PATECORE, and further exploration of intra-community
dynamics is required. The template of actor rationales provided by Fiske (1990b) is helpful here; it explains some of the
motivations for participation in different institutional arrangements, and the
shifting identities that the Mossi take on in
everyday life. The relative inexperience of women's village groups gives them
less bargaining power with external actors, and this contrasts with the large
and active groupementvillageois
that owe something to the legacy of socialism in Burkina Faso.

A second point to emerge was that building anything - including stone lines,
new dwellings and communal buildings - can elevate community status. Projects
involved in environmental improvements and basic rural development activities
need to recognize that such activities are undertaken by communities for
reasons of prestige and as symbols of power, as well as for their more obvious
benefits to crops and material welfare (Edmunds, 1997). A well-managed village
center gives an image of superiority, or wealth, to neighboring communities and
to local government officials, as does a tidy woodlot or a new well built with
external assistance. Perversely, the act of working together in order to
present this image to outsiders can lead to internal village conflict and power
struggles being ignored, overcome, or at least temporarily set aside, as at Toessin. Completed "works" can be consciously
undertaken to present a particular image of diligence to potential donors and
projects - "see how organized and hard working we are." The
literature on indigenous knowledge systems often skims over this aspect of
conscious, goals-oriented forward planning, and it is particularly important
that development projects and extension agents (and researchers concerned with
environment and development issues) probe deep enough to uncover its workings.

Thirdly, I have showed that Mossi and YarsČ farmers organize their labor schedules not just to
"farm" but to undertake a host of activities requiring deadlines and
forward thinking. These "non-passive" activities (Raynaut
1997:211) included building protection works, improving tracks leading to the
village, raising and planting saplings in visible locations, welcoming
visitors, and engaging in a host of activities requiring sometimes considerable
and costly planning. These operations vary by season and between years.

9.4 Village Land Use Management and "community" resource
management
The dissertation has concentrated on the application of a territorial approach
to local resource management, gestion des terroirs, in a period of rapid expansion, uptake, and
experimentation with this approach across West Africa. The coordination of land
rehabilitation exercises by PATECORE has had major, positive impacts on
farmers' own efforts at environmental protection. Something never thought
possible ten years ago - the transformation of many landscapes and the return
to production of acres of barren land - has been carried out. An examination of
aerial photographs of parts of the Central Plateau shows SWC structures to be
highly visible features of the contemporary rural landscape, traversing fields,
bush areas, watersheds and gullies. Most lines and dams are less than fifteen
years old. That such a recent innovation has brought about such important changes
to Plateau environments is particularly challenging to "crisis"
models of rural Africa (Watts, 1989).

While this approach rejects standard technological packages and has been
enthusiastically embraced by the Mossi, it is
fundamentally a "community" approach to the problem of environmental
degradation. It requires participation, a degree of inclusiveness, and a level
of commitment by farmers to a territorial and social unit, the terroir. Although project managers are well aware of the
compromises required of the approach to function efficiently, it is still true
that gestion des terroirs
approaches to resource management are guilty of lumping together diverse actors
under the heading of "community" resource managers, and can sometimes
downplay intra-village conflicts (Mearns, Leach &
Scoones, 1997). By focussing
on community-level processes, they can lose sight of intra-community
differentiation and the requirement of many production units to have at least
one active worker exploiting income-generating opportunities elsewhere in West Africa (Raynaut, 1997:
316). Allen & Hoekstra (1990:9; 1992) remind us that
ecological communities are little more than "temporary
assemblages", of organisms relating to one another through
"competition, adaptation, mutualism and other community mechanisms."
The networks of power within human communities - while these may be concealed
by villagers - need to be understood, in terms of gendered access to land and
other resources, availability of labor and capital, and social and political
status in the community (Rocheleau et al, 1996),
because communities, unlike populations, "involve many species"
(Allen & Hoekstra, 1990:11).

It is still not clear from the study whether the development project,
PATECORE, meets the majority of criteria expected of a "sustainable"
environmental intervention, as discussed in the first Chapter. The central
question is whether the resilience and stability of the human and ecological
system - defined as the "action space" centered on the village terroir of agricultural societies - has been improved by
these interventions. The answer is a qualified "yes". Soil and water
conservation structures are certainly responsible for improving the resilience
of farmers' plots to moisture stress in periods of poor rainfall, and have some
positive effect on crop yields and biomass. PATECORE's
soil and water conservation improvements have been of high quality and will,
with minimal repairs, last for several decades. Plantations, compost pits, and
the provision of donkey carts and basic tools are investments that will yield
continuous returns, and a momentum of training on the use of tube levels and
contour bund construction has already been built up which will allow present
"agro-formateurs" to train their
successors. Only time will tell, however, if these diguette
structures will continue to be built and, importantly, be maintained by
farmers. Only after several years will it be possible
to state with precision whether yields have been consistently sustained.

In terms of the institutional sustainability of these interventions,
however, few in the region are convinced that local government departments will
be able to assume the capital cost of vehicle and truck maintenance should the
project finish. A decision, taken at the outset of work (in 1986-1987), to aid
the delivery of stones to the village by truck rather than by donkey carts,
probably reflected the high level of bilateral support available, and this has
proven extremely expensive by local standards (from 1994-1997, the cost of PATECORE's transport was around 3 million US dollars,
financed by a German bank). Villages, grown used to the availability of trucks
at minimal cost, would have to look elsewhere for transportation or fall back
on local means if this form of assistance was curtailed. The prospect of
creating a cadre of trained administrators and field agents within government
ranks, capable of assuming some of the responsibilities currently being carried
out by project staff, is more encouraging.

I showed in Chapter 8 that insufficient attention had been devoted to the
village meeting, the "interface encounter" (Long, 1989) where outside
and inside meet. Village meetings are the "transmission media" used
in many GTV and most conservation activities. In some cases these meetings are
not the ideal method to reach the poorest individuals, as the data on the Toessin meeting participation showed. Individuals may stay
indoors, remain at their fields, misunderstand, or otherwise remain isolated
from important sessions. Experiments with participatory appraisal exercises
(PRA) have shown that large and small groups can be brought together to debate
and explore key issues, and this technique may form an alternative to large
group meetings, where it is relatively easy for visiting personnel to dominate
the proceedings. Participatory research techniques suffer problems when used on
a repeated basis and, without careful monitoring, can still leave certain
voices unheard (Mosse, 1994; Olivier de Sardan, 1995;
Jackson, 1997). It is true in most cases that, as Fowler (1992:17) points out,
"to realize people's empowerment, participation requires terms of
engagement between the intervening entity and a community that in practice the
project paradigm does not allow." Women's organizations in particular are
poorly addressed in many extension activities, and support to them was not
consistent in the study villages despite womens'
clear role in natural resource management work and agricultural production.
Despite these problems, it can be concluded from the evidence in Chapter Four
that isolated soil conservation works carried out without real communal support
or participation - as is the case where a rich farmer decides to treat his or
her own land alone - would have been less successful than the community-wide
interventions that projects have supported. It is later in the cycle of
intervention, as enthusiasm for project ventures begins to diminish and farmers
turn to work on their individual bush plots, that individualized support to farmers
for their conservation activities will be required.

With these caveats in mind, perhaps the most exciting aspects of the GTV
approach, as referred to in Section 9.1, are its promotion of local territorial
control; the positive effects on intra-community solidarity and communal
sharing; and the use of GTV activities as a vehicle to expand the range of
choices enjoyed by rural people on their lands. As Allen & Hoekstra
(1995:9) and Chambers (1997) remind us, sustainable resource stewardship is
meaningless without social justice. The range of social benefits came across
strongly from the farmer interviews, and in two
seasons of close contact with male and female farmers as they slowly developed
links with project staff and the government extension services. Particularly
notable were the activities of Toessin farmers, who
have designed their own land rehabilitation measures from scratch, discussed
these in village meetings with a high percentage of men and women from
different lineages present, and continue to adjudicate between multiple
criteria (material, and "symbolic") when deciding how to best get the
work done. Consideration is given to land tenure in areas where land
rehabilitation is programmed, the complaints of non-beneficiaries are discussed,
local environmental considerations such as existing ravines and gullies are
examined, and responsibilities for the work are divided up. In
Ibi, however, facing more severe food supply
problems, less income opportunities, and a much abbreviated period of contact
with development agencies, the work of the project had less evidently
"taken off" under local control.

To conclude my observations, I have tried here to present village land use
management (GTV) as a "second-best" form of rural community development.
This is because it is initially managed "from above", yet it retains
a populist framework and a strong local input (Engberg-Pedersen,
1995; Schorlemer, 1996). The combined efforts of
farmers, the project, and the local government services, are striving towards
reducing the vulnerability of local systems to drought and food shortage, and
there have been significant successes, as well as failures, in this regard.
Firstly, I have shown that "land-poor" villages would need major
changes to tenure laws and land access to plan effectively at the terroir level, so there will always be situations where the
terroir remains an unsuitable scale of action.
Secondly, high out-migration can evacuate communities beyond the point where
land-based investment in environmental improvements remains the primary concern
of the community, so farmers accept these interventions "on the road"
to demanding improvements in social welfare or assistance with broadening their
income sources. These two points are actually quite controversial, given the
widespread and rather uncritical support offered to GTV by the World Bank and
other donors. We should be wary of generalizing from these few project
experiences or even a few communities; drylandWest Africa is too complex for simplistic forms of
community-led development.

9.5 The implications for geographical practice
Pioneering work by geographers working in Africa was critical in exposing the
links between underdevelopment, poverty and land degradation (eg Knight, 1974; Porter, 1979; Marchal,
1977; Wisner, 1977), and has more recently been incorporated in a regional
political ecology perspective that is sensitive to the wider political and
economic environments in which land-users operate, take decisions, and carve
out livelihood systems (Blaikie & Brookfield, 1987; Blaikie, 1991; Bassett,
1988; Bryant & Bailey, 1997). The central planks of regional political
ecology were highly influential in this study, although ultimately the case
studies were primarily focussed on local processes -
not the whole range of process and scales demanded by a "nested"
political ecology analysis. I have retained what I considered to be the most
useful arguments from cultural and political ecology: adaptive frames, nested
scales of analysis, and a critical perspective on explanatory variables and
relationships - rather than attempting to overturn previous orthodoxies and to
develop new theoretical propositions. This dissertation has - in a way that is
modest in its aims - concentrated on local systems, and taken a hybrid approach
to arrive at adequate descriptions of agrarian space, using a range of research
techniques to explore the natural and social variables that structure
landscapes and development interventions. There is growing interest in such hybrid
studies that try to combine scientific, critical, and local knowledge sources,
and quite often follow an inductive reasoning process (Batterbury, Forsyth
& Thomson, 1997; Robbins, 1995; Rocheleau et al,
1996).

Environmental issues in developing countries are perceived differently by
diverse actors and it is often a failure to communicate between actors that
leads to a "messy" and conflictual policy
environment, and poorly thought out transfers of technology or knowledge
(Blaikie, 1995a; Batterbury, 1996a). Under such conditions, projects are likely
to fail, or miss a "moving target" - the land users. In the West
African Sahel, we need to study the important social and technical changes that
development projects are setting in motion, as well as beginning to understand
how these projects "think" about the people and environments with
which they are working. Geographers are well placed to assist in this through
the range of critical skills they gain in their training, especially where this
involves study of "nature-society" or "people-environment"
interactions, and long-term fieldwork (Bebbington & Carney, 1990; Bennett,
1976; Binns, 1995; Turner, 1989). It should not compromise our social
consciences to work with those in positions of influence and power to improve
their interventions and to help ensure positive benefits to rural people and
their livelihood systems, and to help translate the wishes of rural dwellers
into "project language" (Chambers, 1992; Ndione
et al, 1995; Rocheleau, 1994; Scoones
& Thompson, 1994).

Some of the study presented the results of my effort to apply the techniques
of cultural ecology in field conditions. My initial conviction that ecological
variables would structure many aspects of farming systems and cultural
practices was only partially borne out in the case study. While the imprint of
soil and water conditions are seen clearly in many aspects of Mossi systems, the social structure itself is a complex
amalgam of hierarchical and egalitarian relationships that appears to have developed
autonomously from the natural milieu. These systems are unlike the stratified
or segmented lineage systems of neighboring groups, as cultural materialist
arguments would predict (Harris, 1979). Rather, the "splendid
diversity" of technical practices (Netting, 1993), particularly in the
agricultural domain, emerged from this limited examination of two villages. The
reverse impacts of people upon the agro-ecological system were evident, and
these were mapped through land use change analysis and consultations with
farmers about the extent and duration of erosion processes and the changes
wrought by the extensification of agriculture under
population growth and technical change. It would be presumptuous to base a
critique of cultural ecology on the limited data obtained. Indeed Rappoport claims all holistic academic efforts at
understanding, in which we may include cultural ecology, are no more than
institutionalized in relatively obscure academic disciplines in which they are
isolated from the conduct of everyday affairs. Whether or not
their findings and perspectives are "accurate, "true",
"correct", or "adaptive" is almost beside the point because
they are powerless. (Rappoport, 1984:329)

I have some sympathy with this damning claim. I understand the worry that
ecological ideas cannot provide an adequate account of nature, or adequately
guide the work of geographers (Demeritt, 1994). But
recent advances in ecology, and environmental history, are considerate of
scale-dependent processes, resilience, and complex human impacts,
and the links are made to concerns about social justice and the practicalities
of environmental action (Simmons, 1997). Rather than move human-environment
work onward to a position where our primary task as geographers is to
"...situate competing knowledges about the
world", and "...make visible the material and discursive effects of
different environmental narratives" (Demeritt,
1994) I feel it is more productive to first obtain practical findings, and
policy implications, beginning with a cultural-ecological analysis. The real
challenge is to ensure that the theoretical apparatus we use is well balanced
between the natural and social sciences. In the dissertation, the much-derided
concept of human adaptation to environment, as employed in many cultural
ecology monographs, was useful as a heuristic concept for explanation. But it
was the diversity of adaptive response by Mossi and YarsČ farmers at multiple and overlapping scales, that
proved most striking, and of most relevance for informing the community-based
land use management process.

Similarly, deficiencies in the political ecology framework have emerged in
my own efforts to apply a loose version of the "regional political
ecology" model. Theorizing in political ecology is fraught with
disagreement, as students of the Blaikie and Brookfield model have now begun to
both refine and attack it, and the methodological ambiguities of the approach
have continued to generate confusion and difficulties in forming comparative
explanations. Recent work in this field has tended to overlook the nuanced
ecological relationships of "continuously scaled fluxes" that
ecologists are now directing us toward (Allen & Hoekstra, 1992), swinging
too far towards a view that social actors determine most ecological outcomes,
including land degradation (see discussion in Batterbury, Forsyth &
Thomson, 1997, and in Zimmerer, 1996). There are good
reasons why this has happened; the ignorance of gender, resource struggles, and
social movements in earlier work has required comment and further conceptual
development (Rocheleau et al, 1996). My primarily
interest in this study has been in developing in an applied political ecology -
a political ecology of environmental management - that fully recognizes the
power of biophysical processes in shaping human responses in drylands. An applied political ecology will not only
identify the powers of political actors linked to environmental issues (Bryant
& Bailey, 1997) or the social constructions of nature by these groups and
the power of social movements (Demeritt, 1994; Peet
& Watts, 1996b). While it is true that new developments in political
ecology open up a flexible analytical terrain suitable to the explanation of
problems like land degradation and resource access in Africa,
it is through critical support to environmental management - or arid lands
management - that practical goals can be achieved through well-targeted
environmental research with, and within, institutions. I have long believed
that the identification of power dynamics, unequal access to resources, and
globalization processes is a vital component of political ecology, but I also
feel that explanation is a necessary but not a sufficient component of this
exciting field (Batterbury, 1997c). The challenge is to turn complex
explanations towards solving complex problems, whether this be
through advocacy, research, or practical advice (Bryant & Bailey, 1997:
196; Price & Thompson, 1997). When beginning this work, I felt there was a
need for the geographical community to become more closely involved in the
network of organizations that are conserving natural resources and tackling
persistent rural poverty in West Africa (Batterbury, 1997a). This does not mean
taking sides with one set of actors against another. Farmers, grass-roots
movements, NGOs, the state, and donors all play a role in social and ecological
change, and none of their actions should be accepted without critical
evaluation (Olivier de Sardan, 1995).

I have tried to show that institutions involved in land rehabilitation of
the marginal environments of Burkina
Faso are confronting issues central to
political ecology models and human-environment studies across more than one
"western" paradigm or disciplinary frontier. Much of the basic
groundwork on village land use management is conducted by local geographers (as
in PATECORE and the Burkina PNGT, for example); skills such as resource
mapping, survey work of all sorts, air photo interpretation and the
identification of social and ecological change are in everyday use. The whole
notion of gestion des terroirs
owes much to the French school of tropical agrarian systems research
inaugurated by the geographers Sautter and Pelissier (Pelissier & Sautter, 1970; Imbs, 1982; Marchal, 1983a; Sautter, 1962) -
a school of research almost completely ignored in anglophone
writing on these same regions, despite its strong conceptual development and
quite advanced methodologies. This work provided the tools to understand the
village terroir in French West
Africa. By helping to apply it, geographers -
and their work - becomes implicated in current struggles to reclaim not
only degraded land but also rural cultural identity; particularly where the
latter is strongly linked to the quality of the local resource base.

9.6 Conclusion
The Central Plateau of Burkina Faso, one of the poorest rainfed
farming environments in West Africa, now hosts a multitude of non-governmental,
bilateral and other initiatives moving forward slowly and with the relatively
modest aim of assisting farmers to achieve marginal increments in food security
through locally managed environmental management initiatives (notably soil and
water conservation). This is a strategy for rural development, and agrarian change, that is more fully cognizant of ecological and
social diversity than past efforts, and frequently involves local land users
and their organizations in setting research and program agendas, at least in
part. It is time that these fruits of conscious planning and experimentation
were recognized (Reij, 1994a:13). The outsider's role
in this complex process may ultimately be to step back and provide a level of
support necessary to allow this process of planning and inventiveness to take
place, not to introduce exogenous blueprints (Richards, 1985; Chambers, 1983).

What building materials, and what tools, and what outside help will be
needed to build and maintain the new agro-ecologies that the Mossi, and farmers in other dryland
situations, are slowly developing? This analysis, which has focussed
on many interlocking aspects of agrarian change and natural resource
management, has shown that there is a need for modest external support to
village organizations, in the form of both technical assistance and practical
help and advice (Dumont, 1986). This
particular form of low-level, flexible support is even more urgent in marginal
farming environments like the Central Plateau, despite the adaptive
capabilities of its farmers. Intensive and permanent cropping systems are still
rare, out-migration is helping to transform production relations, and land
pressures are intense in some areas. A diversity of users occupy
the same geographical space and, for any interventions to be sustainable, the
plurality of local relations between nature and society must be understood and
respected (Raynaut, 1997; 315). The challenge is to
provide a form of support that deals with land pressures, resource degradation,
and social conflict. As currently formulated, the gestion des terroirs approach is best applied to
communities with a strong degree of social cohesion, and relatively
straightforward agrarian systems and land rights (as at Ibi).
Where rights to land are contested, overlapping, and shared between multiple
users (as at Toessin) successful interventions have
only resulted because the local population has played along with gestion desterroirs actors for their own
purposes, and have used them to assist in their struggles for better community
resources and secure land rights. In both situations, there have been winners,
and there have been losers. The challenge is to allow all local people to
identify and create space for their own interests (Long & Villareal, 1994), and to leave decision making where it
really belongs - with individuals, their social networks, and their community
institutions.